Transition from Wifi to Femtocells Begins

Europe is on the eve of its first Femtocell deployment. On July 1st, Vodafone began selling home networking routers that replace home Wifi and extend the coverage of Vodafone’s cell network at the same time. Right now the router costs are too high to justify for anyone but the most dedicated technofile, but the trend has started.

What this means for the world is that cell network coverage will soon be extended incrementally by home users in an organic fashion. As a consumer, you will buy your very own base station that extends your carrier’s network while giving you wireless home networking similar to Wifi. The overall advantage is, that in this future age you will have 3G or 4G networking on your phone, laptop etc that continues to be 3G or 4G when you’re at home, but routes the calls and data ubiquitously over your home internet connection.

Eventually this will turn the phone, Wifi, wireless data, and home internet data markets into one thing that services all of those functions. Of course this will also reduce the overall costs of devices: your cell phone will no longer have to have a wifi chip, a edge/3G chip and a tri band baseband in it. Instead, one protocol will route all the different types of voice and data over the femtocell when you are at home, and the general cell network when you are out.

Cell phone/data providers will be able to leverage their client base to expand their network making big companies bigger. Consumer issues like “I don’t use mobile provider X because their coverage in my house is shaky” will be a thing of the past.

It’s yet unclear how this will play out in Canada. This is once again an case of technology moving faster than the industries that are powering it let alone the governing bodies trying to control it.